Emily at the excellent
Ephemeral Curios, which largely focuses on biological curios, just commented in response to
Mysterious superfruit #2 with another good example of advertising using weird biological images completely unrelated to the product advertised:
Possibly even weirder are these ads for a "weird food" that "kills blood
pressure." It's a Glaucus nudibranch! I think they're actually toxic.
Actually, these advertisers don't seem to be very picky about what marine organism they use. A quick Google image search for "weird food" "blood pressure" finds these.
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| Glaucus atlanticus |
"Glaucus atlanticus (commonly known as the sea swallow, blue angel, blue glaucus, blue dragon, blue sea slug and blue ocean slug) is a species of small-sized blue sea slug, a pelagic aeolid nudibranch, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Glaucidae." - Wikipedia
Google images of it:
"Glaucus atlanticus". It's an absolutely amazing little creature.
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| Squid |
This one is just some species of
squid.
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| Nine-tentacled octopus |
This one you're unlikely to find; it's a well-circulated image of a mutant
nine-tentacled octopus that "was spotted at the Marusan Seafood Shop in Marugame, Japan (Kagawa
prefecture) on October 26, one day after it was caught in the Seto
Inland Sea. Masa Koita, the 60-year-old shop manager, noticed the
abnormal Common Octopus (
Octopus vulgaris) after he had boiled it in preparation for market."
This one is just
calamari salad (Insalata di calamari) from the Angela's Italian Organic Oregano website.
This one is amiyaki surume: a Japanese seasons and dried squid snack. The image appears to have been ripped off from the
Snack Attack blog.
This one is a California sea hare (
Aplysia californica). The image comes from the
Gray Whales of San Ignacio Lagoon weblog (text by Tom O’Brien, photos by Karen Capp).
Go figure...
Edit: Dan Schwab of Keytoons explains at
Weird Food (for yout heart!). There is a partial pertinence, in that the ads are for a new supplement in vogue, partially based on calamari oil; that at least explains the squid.
- Ray
Wow, I didn't know just how many variations there were on this ad!
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I think the "marble" in the Keytoons article is a ctenophore or comb jelly, probably related to the one shown in this post:
http://natureinfocus.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/sea-gooseberries-at-rhossili/
Thanks for the detail, and the lead in the first place. The "sea gooseberry" image tracks ultimately back to this one on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisamariaschlosser/10541769/
ReplyDeleteThat Glaucus atlanticus is amazing - and as you say, it's toxic, at least sting-wise; it eats stinging cnidarians and uses the nematocysts in its own tissues. (I identified the originals with Google Images - just crop the blurb off, and feed the image to Google Images, which accepts uploads or image URLs).
I've seen one multiple times that illustrates a "sea gooseberry"…which is just a zooplankton. The image they use is my own photo that a marketing company has taken from my flickr account against copyright. I am lisa maria. Thanks for siting the source Ray, putting a stop to it is just as tricky as stopping their false claims.
ReplyDeleteYea I can't believe that company is still getting away with stealing pics from people to use as their advertising. That's got to be illegal!? (That sea swallow/blue angel thing is pretty). Thank you :-)
ReplyDelete